


be gone

by mnemememory



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, some kind of weird narnia fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-09 16:39:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15271767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnemememory/pseuds/mnemememory
Summary: Beau has had this conversation before, in a different place, with a different man.(or; beau walks out of a cupboard, and can't seem to find her way back)





	be gone

…

…

**be gone**

…

…

There’s a shaking, to the way Beau walks.

It hadn’t been there before – well. Before she had been sent away. Her father eyes her cautiously, but there’s a hole in his head from a bullet that hadn’t fired, and he can’t quite see right anymore. He’s missing things, he knows, but that’s always been the case. Even before Beau was born, he’s been missing things. One more can’t hurt.

She drinks, it what it is. That never happened before. Beau’s mother frets, the first time she comes down to see Beau settling her way into the stores. _You’re twelve_! she shouts, fists in the air and skin so, so gaunt. Food is a kickback to a different time, and Beau shovels in what she can and compensates with alcohol. So much alcohol.

Beau stares at her and doesn’t reply, which is the strangest thing, this shell-shocked steadiness. She moves like a cat and hisses when frightened, which is never, because they can never seem to get her to stay still long enough to talk. Beau pulls herself back from pieces, and her parents watch and worry and don’t do anything. They can’t do anything. They don’t even know why she broke.

“We sent her away to avoid this,” her mother says, late at night when Beau is supposed to be in bed (she’s not). “We tried so hard to keep her out of the war.”

“I don’t know what happened to her,” Beau’s father agrees, but he’s not listening, not really. He can’t seem to focus properly these days. Sleeping beside his wife is a struggle. There’s a knife only a few metres away, close enough for comfort, far enough away that if he wakes up and panics, she’ll have time to run.

“They were supposed to keep her safe,” his wife persists. “That professor, and that big house, so far away in the country –”

(Beau is far away, as far away as she can get from the tavern and still be in the same city. The streets are awash with starvation and decay. She walks the rain-swept, stinking cobblestones and tries to feel at home).

…

…

Two years, three days and twenty-three hours (Beau doesn’t keep track by hours, not really, but she likes to think she knows the exact amount of time that has passed) afterwards, she finds Caleb.

He is worse-off than she is, which is a kick to the gut. She’s walking at night and trying to keep to the shadows, avoiding eye-contact with the increasing presence of a guard-force that will look at a fourteen-year-old girl and think… _things_. Maybe good, maybe bad. Beau wants neither.

Beau almost trips over him. He’s a small lump in the road, adhered to the wall with a layer of grime and soot. Beau rights herself with a graceful (shut up, it was graceful) wobble, and then kneels down to peer into manic blue eyes.

“What the fuck,” she says, jumping back and grabbing for her –

Which is wrong, because she’s just a fourteen-year-old girl. She’s got a knife or two (or three), but that’s about it. Small enough to avoid notice, to be tucked into her sleeve or strapped to her ankle. Small enough to feel light and useless. Beau wants to crack skulls, not slit someone groin to shoulder. She could do it. She’s strong enough.

(She was strong enough, once upon a time).

“Beauregard,” Caleb says. He’s small enough to be in his teens, which he isn’t. Later, Beau will find this grossly unfair. If Beau was twelve-and-thirteen-and-fourteen again, she wants Caleb to suffer every awkward second of puberty with her.

Except it looks like Caleb has suffered, and suffered, and suffered. Of course he has, because he is Caleb, and life has dictated that things cannot ever go well for him.  Life has dictated the same of Beau, but to a lesser extreme.

“My parents died in the bombs,” he says, numb, and Beau reaches out to hug him.

…

…

Maybe things are a little easier, after that.

Or, if not easier, there’s a bit of _ease_ to the way Beau’s heart beats. Less blind panic waking her up in the night, things crawling out of her mouth that aren’t supposed to exist. _My name is Beauregard, of the Mighty Nein, of the Cobalt Soul –_

So maybe it gets easier, having a friend to tell her that she’s not crazy, and maybe it’s not, because she’s not crazy anymore. Things can be explained away. Anything can be explained away, if Beau works at it hard enough – she’s always been violent. She’d been well on her way to setting up some kind of trafficking ring at ten years old, and then some. There isn’t much in her veins that doesn’t bleed fire.

But here Caleb is, sodden and foul-smelling and almost as broken as when they first met, and things aren’t just in her head anymore.

Beau smuggles him into her room, because if she can smuggle liquor out at ten she can smuggle a skinny teenager in at fourteen. Beau knows every inch of this place, has painstakingly relearned every floorboard and window. At twelve, she ripped off the doors to the cupboard and parted her clothing down the middle, the wooden back on full display. Caleb stares at it for a second on his first stay but doesn’t say anything. Beau doesn’t know whether to be grateful or not.

“It has certainly been a while,” Caleb says, sitting gingerly on her bed. Beau kicks open her desk drawer and starts pulling out a first-aid kit, unravelling pieces of scavenged bandage. She misses the ease of a potion, the quickness of a spell, but that isn’t possible here so re-using bandages it her only option for now.

For now.

“Sure has,” Beau agrees, holding out her hand for his arm.

Caleb visibly hesitates, but after a few seconds he complies. Beau does the best she can, all the while fiercely missing Jester.

“how long have you been here?” Beau says, while smudging away the dirt to get at the wounds. There are a lot of them. After a moment of debate, she reaches under her bed to rinse his arm with alcohol. It runs over his skin and splashes to the floor.

“Two years,” Caleb says, holding his breath against the pain. “Give or take.”

“Funny that,” Beau says, and ties off the bandage with a piece of tape. She sits back on her haunches, staring up at Caleb’s tired face. There are tear-tracks blacked-out with soot, lips cracked and eyes screaming. “That’s about the same for me.”

_You should take a bath_ , Jester says, a ghost between them. _You really smell_.

Beau wonders if Caleb hears them the way she does. She very carefully doesn’t ask.

“I am not sure what I am doing here,” Caleb says, and then Beau is laughing hard enough to crack a rib. She rolls onto the ground and stares at the ceiling, chest convulsing, arms wrapped around her stomach. On the bed, Caleb is in a similar state of mania. They laugh together, there, as the sun cracks blood and blue over a silhouetted city.

…

…

Beau closes her eyes, and she’s kissing Yasha.

They’re tangled up under the night sky, grass hiding them from the campsite. It’s chilly, but not chilly enough that Beau isn’t seriously considering stripping them both. Yasha pauses long enough to laugh at her, which means Beau isn’t as subtle as she likes to think.

She rolls them over, so Yasha is underneath her. Yasha lets her, because there’s no way that Beau could pull that off if Yasha hadn’t wanted it. Beau tangles her fingers into Yasha’s hair, and Yasha’s hands are underneath her shirt, and they’re just kissing and kissing and kissing.

…

…

It’s cute at twelve, when Beau has just gotten back and her father has just gotten not-dead and her mother is soaking them in (while they soak up her alcohol). It’s cute at twelve, when the world is newly not at war and the city is frantically rebuilding itself in the shadow of a new history.

It’s kind of cute at thirteen, the way Beau swears more than proper and keeps more knives on her person than either of her parents know. _At least she’s safe_ , her mother says dubiously, while her husband nods along and tries to pay attention. He keeps zoning in and out, these days, and Beau’s mother has more to worry about than her wayward daughter.

Except she does worry, because Beau doesn’t know how to keep out of trouble to save her life. Something happened while she was away in the country, which was supposed to be impossible, because she was supposed to be _safe_. But here she is, back with sharp words and a sharper smile and a glaze to her eyes that reminds her mother of her husband, just a little. The ways he sits in front of a fire and stares, the way he looks at a gun and immediately looks away.

At fourteen, Beau isn’t cute and she isn’t smart and she isn’t anything but a nuisance and a disgrace and a burgeoning alcoholic. Her mother locks the cellar every night and can’t fathom how her daughter can pick the locks every single time. That _friend_ of hers, a ratty orphan that smells of smoke and sulphur, that follows Beau around like a grim shadow. Beau’s mother wants to wring him, wants to demand that he _stay away from her daughter_ , but she can never seem to catch him in a room alone.

The thing is, Beau’s mother wants her daughter back. She wants her husband back. She wants the world to make sense, and her alcohol to sell, and the sun to shine.

“I’m going to be out late,” Beau says, sliding out of the kitchen with a knapsack of something. Her smile is something foreign and strange. “See you tomorrow. Maybe.”

Beau’s mother sits back and watches her leave. That’s all it seems she can do, these days.

…

…

Beau is fifteen, and her father is done.

“You need to start thinking about more than yourself,” he says. He’s lucid, sitting her down at the bar before opening. Her mother is – not here. Somewhere else, as usual. “You can’t keep hanging around with that – that man –”

_Try smiling, sometimes_ , Fjord says.

Beau bares her teeth. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”

“We can’t keep turning a blind eye to your – illicit dealings, Beauregard,” her father says. “You’re very important to us, of course you are, but the things you do sometimes, I. I wonder about you.”

“ _I_ wonder about _you_ ,” Beau says. “And I’m not having this conversation with you.”

“Beauregard –”

(Beau has had this conversation before, in a different place with a different man. She recognises the slope of his shoulders, the tired, resigned weight of his eyes.

_I can’t keep doing this_ , he told her, once –

And then there was kicking, and screaming, and blood. A lot of blood. Beau hadn’t gone down easy, for all that she had gone down, in the end).

…

…

People don’t like Caleb, which is a total fucking surprise.

Beau doesn’t mean that people don’t like _Caleb_ ; Caleb himself is a very likeable person, underneath the layers and layers (and _layers_ , good god, man) of self-doubt and self-loathing and guilt. But people look at his face, and they don’t like his accent, his height, his intelligence. Beau spends as much time running liquor as she does keeping his face unbruised.

“I can take care of myself,” Caleb protests, which is a lie. Caleb couldn’t take care of himself to save his life. Nott isn’t here, Nott the Brave and Nott the Strong and Nott, Caleb’s best friend in the whole world, so Beau has to step up a little. She doesn’t mind, so much, aside from having to chase the occasional dealer out of town. Caleb’s never really gotten into drugs, but for some reason people seem to think he should.

Beau pointedly slathers stinging ointment into his forearm, and he winces and doesn’t say anything at all. Beau wants to shake him. _You don’t have Frumpkin anymore_ , she wants to say. Sometimes to remind him to be careful, and sometimes because she just wants him to _hurt_ like she does. It’s like he doesn’t realise that she’s tired, too. _You don’t have Frumpkin, you don’t have Nott, and you don’t have fire –_

Caleb had tried, apparently, when he had first come…back. Casting something had been a nightmare of indecision. Every snap of his fingers weighted down by non-existent sparks.

The way Caleb steps, it’s with Frumpkin pressing ghost-like and inconvenient to his ankles. Beau has to catch him when he trips on nothing.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he told her, once. They’re both drunk enough to regret it tomorrow. “It’s – listen, it’s just a different _dimension_ , or a _plane_ , or – or – it shouldn’t matter –”

It shouldn’t matter.

It isn’t as much fun, here, without the others. Beau gathers the rats of the world around her, the angry and the hungry (and the sometimes lost). She builds a network and tries to remember what the Cobalt Soul taught her. You have to know how something works to dismantle it.

But it isn’t the same – the carefree movement, the stares in the sky and the road at their feet. Everything in her itches. She wakes up, every morning, and knocks on the back of her cupboard. _Let me in_ , she says. _I’m ready to go back._

(She pretends not to notice Caleb doing the same thing).

…

…

“She would not mind, you know.”

Beau glances up from the map, the back of her neck tingling. Caleb is the only other person in the room, and usually that is how she likes it, but not today.

“Don’t start,” she warns, dragging a finger down the map. It is nowhere near as beautiful as the ones back – back there; even at their most crude, there was more love to those lines than the printed blocks under her palms.

“It has been a great many years, Beauregard. I do not think Yasha would mind –”

“Well, maybe _I_ would mind,” Beau says. She can’t wash Talia’s taste out of her mouth. There’s an empty pack of gum crumpled in her bag, along with two hollow bottles of water.

It hadn’t been much of anything – just a quick kiss that had gotten a lot deeper than Beau had been prepared for, and – and Beau should have been prepared for it. Talia is a nice girl, with a sharp eye for coin and a steady hand with ink, and Beau _knew_ –

It had been fun, at first, walking her around the city. A lot of fun. Getting things done with someone at her side other than Caleb, offering new insights, new ideas. Newness. Things hadn’t been bad at all, actually, until Beau had glanced at their silhouetted shadows and thought _, Why is Yasha so small –?_

It had been ended. Immediately.

It was just, they’d been drunk tonight. They’d been drunk, and celebrating, and –

And –

Beau shudders.

“Alright,” Caleb says.

…

…

This is what they say: _Inhuman, those two. Tough as nails. Scary as fuck._

At twenty, Beau laughs herself sick when she hears it. Caleb rolls his eyes at her and sits to the side, reading. They had acquired an old warehouse on the edge of respectability, inches away from the better part of town. It houses crates of smuggled goods, shoved underground. The upper half is an “abandoned”, burnt-out husk of a real thing. Beau finds it easy to just sit back and let things happen underneath her feet, playing lookout while Caleb plunders the bookstores of the city.

“Inhuman,” she gasps, half-leaning against the wall. _“Us_.”

“I do not understand the comparison,” Caleb says, not looking up from the pages. “We are fairer than most.”

“We don’t exactly advertise that,” Beau says.

“This will not work in our favour,” Caleb says.

Beau rolls her eyes. “We need Molly here to run PR,” she says, and then snaps her mouth shut.

They stare at each other, Caleb ripped from the book and forcibly shoved back into his body. Beau wets her lips and tries to recapture her mirth, but it’s gone, with nothing left but cobwebs and dust.

“Yes,” Caleb finally says. “He would be greatly beneficial.”

Beau clears her throat a few times. “Fjord could be our spokesperson,” she says.

“Beauregard,” Caleb says. “That has always been your job.”

…

…

Beau is twenty-three and so _tired_ , okay.

Also, she’s just been shot.

“Of all the stupid…” Caleb mutters, dragging her along the backstreets and towards – towards somewhere. Not their warehouse, because it’s crawling with police. Somewhere else. Somewhere safe, hopefully. “Beauregard, if you die, I will be very annoyed.”

“Sorry ‘bout that,” Beau wheezes, trying – and mostly failing – to stay upright. “Wasn’t – wasn’t looking at –”

“Kindly shut up,” Caleb says.

Beau does, but only because she can’t feel her tongue. Not because Caleb told her to. There’s an important distinction to that.

They stumble on, hobbled by Beau’s failing body and Caleb’s failing strength. If Jester were here, she’d be laughing. If Jester were here, this wouldn’t be an issue.

Beau wonders, sometimes, what the others saw. _What happened to us_? Had they both just disappeared in the middle of the night? Had they just upped and vanished and been presumed dead? There are so many questions – there are ten years’ worth of questions, stacking one on top of the other, anchoring her down. _Is Yasha okay? Are they all okay? Are they looking for us? Are they –?_

They round the corner, and Beau’s steps really stutter.

“You can’t be serious,” she says.

Caleb ignores her, hauling them both into a familiar side-door and grappling her up the stairs. It’s slow going. Caleb isn’t Yasha, isn’t Jester, and suffers for it. By the time they make it into Beau’s old bedroom, which has become choked with dust and the remnants of a dead girl, they are both gasping.

Beau collapses onto her bed, ankles hanging off the edge. Blood soaks through her tunic and into the sheets.

“My parents will have a fit,” she says.

“Your parents are out of town,” Caleb says. “I keep an eye on them.”

Beau shakes her head and closes her eyes. Yasha is kissing her, light and bright and –

Caleb slaps her cheek.

Beau’s eyes fly open, and she glares at him, blood gurgling behind her teeth. Her skin feels warm and sticky, iron soaking into the inside of her throat. She wants to say something cutting, but everything is blank and fuzzy. She just wants to pass out. She’s so tired, okay.

“Do not go to sleep,” he orders her. Then, on shaking legs, he drags her off the bed and towards the open cupboard.

…

…

**Author's Note:**

> “I will not write an angst-ridden, flowery, non-linear story this week” I say, blatantly lying. 
> 
> Oh god, this week has been. A week. *twitches*
> 
> Inspiration came from a vague combination of ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and Seanan McGuire’s ‘Wayward Children’ series, which is excellent and you should definitely read. The title is from ‘Don’t Wait For Us’ by BLOW, which I listened to on repeat while writing this (side note: the trailer for ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’ looks *so good*, you guys).


End file.
